


My Friend The Emperor

by sharkcar



Series: Clone Wars Tarot Cards [20]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Clones (Star Wars) - Freeform, Despotism, Guns, Joseph Campbell, Languages and Linguistics, Leadership, Masculinity, Power Dynamics, Strategy & Tactics, Tools, Violence, Weequay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-04
Updated: 2018-03-04
Packaged: 2019-03-27 02:34:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13871268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharkcar/pseuds/sharkcar
Summary: Eight years after the Clone War, a kidnapping by pirates in the Outer Rim leads Commander Cody to stage a rescue mission with the mercenary crew he's assembled. The lawless region has provided ample opportunities for a man of his particular set of skills. While on the mission, he has time to muse on what he learned from his time spent as an Imperial tool.Commander Cody has a dark sense of humor.





	My Friend The Emperor

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this a few months ago but it sort of took on a life of its own. Cody is one of my favorite narrators because his conflicts are so complicated. The Emperor tarot card is about traditional masculinity and that issue has a lot to explore at the moment. It's also about leadership, about which there is a lot to say as well. Much is touched on here. In thinking about masculinity, I thought clones were appropriate to represent that in its extreme. They only have a father, are all male, and were made to do a very traditionally male job. The crate...well, if you've read Lost Batches of Kamino, you already know what's in the box. That references an actual practice from the ancient world, specifically ancient Egypt, which you can see illustrated on a huge frieze in Medinet Habu. Look it up! Another line about someone holding shoes was a reference to the Narmer Palette, one of the most brazenly masculine images I've ever seen. In my characterization of the Emperor, interested in history and some other things, I was excited to see Rebels last week with the archaeological dig in the temple, where the story seemed to confirm what I was saying about him.  
> In the illustration, the mountains on the tarot card are represented by Aoraki, for obvious reasons. The wrench is a prop from the old cartoon 'Droids'. I like to bring in old school stuff when I can. I'm just amusing myself here, for the most part.

[LINK HERE: The Emperor](https://sharkcar.tumblr.com/post/171529228490/the-emperor-part-of-a-series-of-illustrations-for)

Back during the Clone War, I didn’t have many real friends. At least not ones I could tell the complete truth to. I had a stressful job and most of my work was highly classified. Clones were segregated from the natural born citizenry, by and large. I told myself it made sense, for reasons of security. We had each other, but brothers can be really judgmental. And stupid. And ignorant. It wasn’t our faults, we hadn’t had much of a chance to interact with people who weren’t just like us. Same dead end job, grew up in an insular community, everyone shared the same biases, stuck to their own kind. And brothers aren’t good listeners. When your audience is your brothers, you can expect that they will be rude to you, no matter what you say. Even the most heartfelt sincere expression will be met with fart noises or some insult for showing weakness. In the academy, we boys were constantly in competition with each other. The cloners posted our numbers and rankings daily. They tested us constantly and publically, failure meant shame and derision. Punishment for not measuring up could have meant the maintenance corps, never leaving Kamino for the rest of your life. None of us had ever been anywhere else before the war, but we knew we wanted to leave that prison as they kept promising we would. Maintenance corps was a mark of dishonor, and worse, from us brothers, pity. You literally needed the approval of your betters to survive back on Kamino. We were conditioned to crave it because their approval meant things that felt good, an extra few crumbs of rations, a cube of sugar, or whatever. Doing anything other than what they wanted could have meant stuff that felt bad, like electrocution, or dying. There wasn’t much room for error.  
  
Back during the war, I met the then Supreme Chancellor through a mutual acquaintance, Captain Wilhuff Tarkin after I’d helped rescue him from a prison on Lola Sayu. The Chancellor said he’d heard good things about me. It didn’t feel insincere, he went out of his way to check in with me and I was surprised by what a good listener he was. He didn’t make me feel like a child when he talked to me, the way most people did. Most people assume we clones are stupid because most brothers are inarticulate. It wasn’t our faults. Most brothers had no further education than drills and battle simulation. I could see the waste in that from the privilege of my leadership academy on the top floor of the training facility. Once I was out in the big wide galaxy, I knew how it meant to feel small. Everyone I met either knew I was only ten years old or thought I was primitive. Or, even without any judgment from them, I wouldn’t understand something because of my sheltered life and I would think they could tell and judged me stupid. Clone thing. Even we don’t think much of ourselves. When we left Kamino, we could see how much we didn’t know.  
  
My friend had a way of seeing past your faults. Of knowing your desires. Of telling you your fears weren’t irrational. Of reassuring you that you weren’t crazy. Or you weren’t alone. I had never cried in front of anyone that wasn’t a brother before. When he called me in to ask about Umbara, I just couldn’t help it. He didn’t make me feel helpless. He actually took my hand and told me he’d do anything he could to protect me. I told him things I’d never told a soul before. Things I couldn’t tell anyone in polite society because they were too horrifying. He always helped me find my direction. When the ruler of the Galactic Republic tells you that your work serves a higher purpose, you can believe he knows what he’s talking about. He can assure you that there is a bigger picture that you just cannot see, a greater good. What he doesn’t tell you is that the only ‘good’ is what he’s constructed, and you have been put to a purpose like the tool you are.  
  
We were both fans of history, my friend had read. He filled my head with his vision for a future that I could get behind, he had passion and ideals. Once he had the Empire under his control, my friend the self-declared Emperor did whatever he wanted. He didn’t live up to his promises, but I could see it was according to his plan. He had told everyone he dealt with something different. Then he demanded overt shows of loyalty, or executed people on the slightest suspicion. Not much room for error.  
  
No one was his equal because no one could tell him what to do. But everyone did what he said. Everybody was afraid of him. He was impossible to out-maneuver. The guy could see every angle somehow and exploit your every weakness. He justified it because he had the absolute total conviction that his way was right, so he allowed himself to enjoy being cruel. He actually felt happy when everyone was as miserable as him.  
  
That was the difference between him and Tarkin, for instance, Tarkin had no passion. He looked like he’d been drained of all fluids. Working for the Emperor bled people. Until you just didn’t care anymore. That’s when you know you’ve turned. When you realize none of what you were promised, or hoped for, would ever come. Yet you keep doing what the Emperor wants for fear of him turning his yellow gaze on you. Your neck still grows weary from hanging your sorry head. I was one of the lucky ones. I was one of the few people who could say he survived being friends with the Emperor.  
  
\--  
  
The bandits had arrived one morning just as the villagers were starting work in the fields. The pirate ship landed the thieves brandished weapons. The villagers stood their ground. The leader of the community went to bargain with them and see what they would take to go away.  
  
The robbers were just carrying out a standard scheme among enterprising Outer Rim businessmen, threatening people in order to steal from them. It required minimal effort on their part. There was little risk of anyone caring, people were on their own in the Outer Rim. If there was no property to steal, the people could be either ransomed, raped, or sold off as slaves, all to the advantage of the crew. But that was work and most pirates are lazy. So villages usually surrendered property and the pirates left. Everyone left behind either starved or survived on what they had left.  
  
Piracy was an omnipresent danger for the millions of remote settlements in the lawless Outer Rim territories. The region was poorly policed, with no help from the Empire until they wanted to build a factory and pollute the skies, or needed recruits for the Stormtrooper corps, or labor, or just wanted to show up and demand bribes.  
  
Nobody really wanted to be in the Outer Rim. People were out there trying to scratch out a living because they couldn’t afford to any other way than dirt farming. Ships and fuel are expensive, they had to stay where they were. Trade goods were getting harder to come by because no traders wanted to come where they couldn’t count on protection for their ships. But at least in the Outer Rim the poor had a chance. People were literally starving to death in cities on Core worlds for lack of money.  
  
The Outer Rim was risky, though. Out here, alone, there was nothing to stop these pirates from taking all of the food and valuables that the settlers had. Villages just had to hope that since there were billions of other settlements just like theirs, that the chance of it happening was statistically small. They could do little to prevent catastrophes, so hope was all they had.  
  
The job of a village leader was to negotiate out of the situation and keep everyone alive. In smaller numbers, in the wilderness, these villages couldn’t afford even a single loss of life. They didn’t have much in the way of medical supplies or vaccines, so they had high mortality rates anyway. Some settlers had arms and put up some resistance. Pirates usually made it their business to have superior hardware and they didn’t care much about killing innocent people. This usually ended with a lot of dead villagers and the pirates took everything anyway. Then you end up with the only survivors being kids who were told to hide.  
  
The village leader told the pirates that what they had wasn’t valuable, but that she could offer them something else if they left everyone alone. The village leader said that if the pirates would leave right then, she would go with them. She told them she was a wanted fugitive from the Empire and that there was a half a million credit bounty on her if they turned her in. She would not resist, instead she directed them to a holo-net site that gave the com signature of what was identified as the Imperial authorities.  
  
They sent a transmission and the man who answered the call gave coordinates for a rendezvous point where the prisoner could be brought and a bounty would be paid to hand her over. These bandits were no doubt very proud of themselves for stumbling across such a lucky boon. It was a chance for a big score with minimal work. The only problem was that they were dealing with Imperials, and everybody knows how tricky that is.  
  
\--  
  
I ran a mercenary crew in the Outer Rim that was sometimes hired by richer settlements to counter these threats. We took the jobs because as I say, in the Outer Rim, people are just scratching out a living. Us too. Brothers got to get paid. In the Outer Rim, it was the de facto law, whoever was the strongest got to make their own rules, while everyone else generally got the shaft. People in the Outer Rim mostly expect that. What we offered was a little extra strength. My friend the Emperor had told me once that an anooba eat anooba wilderness situation was actually good for people. It allowed the fittest to survive and the best would naturally rise to the top based on their own merits. I don’t know what he was talking about. He had all the power in the galaxy and also the posture of a gutkurr. His zombie life partner Vader sounded like he was constantly winded. If you ever saw the officers corps of the Imperial Navy after the Clone War, you would wonder where all the ‘fitness’ went. They were a bunch of the sickliest pale sad little men, monologuing theatrical speeches and showing off their gigantic laser canons.  
  
My crew never acted like these miscreants, I scoffed, when I heard about the kidnapping. I found it uncivilized. We clones were raised in the good old Republic, a place with laws and societal expectations, we clones were given at least a minimum of education about right and wrong. That kind of ended once the Jedi were dead, though. After we suddenly turned on the Jedi and killed them, we mostly had no idea why we’d done it and had to rationalize it on our own. Our sense of right and wrong got all flipped around. Those of us who knew about the control chips were forbidden from saying anything for fear of our lives. My friend the Emperor told me when we were alone in a room together that Order 66 never happened and I had no choice but to will myself to believe something I knew was a lie because it was what he wanted.  
  
It was three hours from when the pirates had taken the village leader and my crew was in position. Three hours was fast for mobilizing a rescue. But it was enough time to do her harm. I had spent every minute thinking about that as I briefed my brothers and the rest of our gang on the plan. At least when I was busy, I didn’t feel helpless. As we waited for the bandits to show up, I closed my eyes and focused my anger. I calmed myself by whispering a little chant I’d made up, directed at my rifle. I thanked her for all the times we had been successful in battle, then the refrain, ‘Who’s a good girl?’ My guys were used to it.  
  
The pirate ship fell out of hyperspace and found an Imperial shuttle waiting.  
  
The pirate captain opened a channel. He appeared on the holo-viewer surrounded by dozens of men.  
  
On his viewer, he would have seen one blond man in an Imperial Security Bureau uniform and three Stormtroopers.  
  
“Are you the Imperials?” The captain asked.  
  
“What tipped you off?” The ISB agent said, sarcastically.  
  
The pirate seemed a little shamed by that refined Imperial arrogance. That Core accent does that to people.  
  
“Yes. We’ve brought the prisoner. But we want our payment, in spice, if you please.” With the last phrase he had mocked the Core accent. The pirate captain postured, trying to look tough in front of his guys. Like he was giving the orders. They out-numbered and out gunned the ‘Imperials’ in the puny shuttle, but they were all on edge.  
  
Dealing with Imperials did that to people. Nobody wasn’t afraid of Imperials. They were the strongest there were and there was nobody who dealt with Imperials that wasn’t probably gonna get the shaft. Everyone expects that. My friend the Emperor once told me that fear was the only thing common to all people and it was the only thing they really listened to. Only ultimate power brought you freedom from it. I found that my friend the Emperor spoke a lot in absolutes. ‘All people’ or ‘only thing’. He certainly was free of one thing. Nuance.  
  
“We have the payment, we will of course need to see the prisoner before we hand it over,” the blond ISB agent said. He was keeping with standard Imperial protocol. As far as the pirates could see, we were legit.  
  
The pirate kept posturing. But in his nervousness, he kept glancing over at an associate beside him. “We’ll show you the prisoner when we have our spice safely on board.” He pointed a blaster sideways at the holo-viewer for emphasis. His men chuckled.  
  
“You said before that you’d brought her,” the ‘ISB agent’ tripped him up.  
  
The pirate looked a little wary, as if trying to remember what he’d said.  
  
The ‘ISB agent’ merely looked impatient. “Do you have her with you, or is she at another location.”  
  
“She’s safe.” The man at whom the pirate captain was glancing had spoken up. Interesting, I thought. Pirate captains don’t usually permit other guys to speak in negotiations. It would have meant a threat to their power and they don’t trust anyone because as everyone knows, pirates are untrustworthy.  
  
“If you don’t have her, we are wasting our time.” The ‘ISB agent’, really my crewmember Dorn, waved his hand. He was stalling as well, just like I’d told him to.  
  
“Fine! Fine.” The pirate turned to his associate. The associate nodded. “Wait…if I could just have your operating number, Agent? To confirm your credentials.”  
  
Now, not only was this unbelievable because pirates don’t know words like ‘confirm’ and ‘credentials’. This was not a believable course of action for a pirate. I mean, when white college boys on Coruscant got pulled over for operating speeders while intoxicated, they often tried to stall with due process. Just so they wouldn’t lose face for not being in a superior position. Those boys had lived their whole lives and never been in a position of weakness. So they’d ask to see badges and warrants and the like. As if they knew what those looked like. As if it would matter. Unlike Coruscant college boys, thugs in the Outer Rim have not seen holo-vids about cops and lawyers. No Outer Rim guys think we can talk our way out of things, we knew authorities just did what they wanted. We expected that. I used to work for my friend the Emperor as an Imperial agent. I was on many missions where I think only my friend the Emperor knew what my orders really were, there was certainly no accountability except to him. For normal folks in the Core, my friend the Emperor was good at giving the illusion that the galaxy had laws and security. In the Outer Rim, we knew that Imperial entanglements meant you were screwed.  
Bottom line, this script the pirate had been given was bad. This being an Imperial plan, it was no doubt a setup for both sides. The real Imperials would be along after this exchange went south and both these pirates and my crew had blasted each other to pieces. The pirate captain was starting to realize this too. I kept watching the pirate’s associate.  
  
Inside my helmet, a com chirped. It meant my strike team had completed its objective. I was ready to wrap this up.  
  
The pirates were surprised when one of the Stormtroopers, who was wearing a poncho over his armor for some reason, came forward and addressed them directly. Stormtroopers weren’t permitted to speak much either. “He’s ISB agent 80085.” I said.  
  
This joke was a Commander Wolffe classic. Math class humor from when we were kids. Even as adults, when a woman would walk by and we wanted to alert each other about a nice rack, he would mention Agent 80085 instead of making her uncomfortable or leering. As I said, we clones can be stupid. In this instance, I used an ‘80085’ as code to tell my team to, ‘get ready’.  
  
The associate looked confused for a fraction of a second. There was no way for him to know if that was a valid badge number or not. The ISB had so many different branches operating independently, they couldn’t ever really be sure who was on their side. He ‘absentmindedly’ touched his nose. I read it as a sign he thought we were just what we said.  
  
The pirate captain saw this. “Okay, we’ll bring her up.” He looked a bit relieved, like a man in over his head that has dared to hope that he might get out of this alive. Maybe they told him he would. I could understand the reasons why he’d done this, the Imperials paid well. When I did black ops for my friend the Emperor after the war, I made deals with people way more desperate than this guy. People had to get paid. Gangs weren’t like the army. Criminals have to keep their guys satisfied or else they will aggressively seek new leadership. This could be a concern at higher levels too. My friend the Emperor spent most of his time making sure there were no other leadership options. He had everything, wealth, power. No one could touch him, but all he ever seemed to talk about was ‘crushing his enemies’. I used that phrase a lot when I did my Emperor impression.  
  
The pirate spoke into a comlink. “Be ready to lock the level down if they start shooting, if this goes to shit, she’s all we have to show for this.” He evidently didn’t trust us or his associates. He had been speaking on the com to his men, I knew, because he had been speaking in badly pronounced Huttese. All gangsters speak some Huttese. It makes them sound hardcore, they think. Imperials never speak it, so it can work as a code. I do speak it, but I learned it back during the war when the Republic awarded us cash bonuses for acquiring fluency in new languages. It’s notoriously easy once you understand the grammatical system, and yes, it does make you sound hardcore.  
  
The pirate captain was still worried about his reward. He turned his attention back to us. “Alright. Half a million credits in spice? Will you be boarding to bring it, or will we be coming over to take it?” We hadn’t revealed ourselves to be more than run of the mill Imperial officials. They wouldn’t fire on and risk losing their payment.  
  
Dorn looked at his fingernails. His manicure was always perfect. He and my brother Pavlos used to do each other’s nails. I guess that is how they’d started their personal relationship on Coruscant, back in the Stormtrooper corps together. They’d requested a transfer to be guards in a military labor prison I the Outer Rim as a way of trying to have a little freedom. Coruscant in those days wasn’t a very friendly place for people who didn’t fit the right mold. My friend the Emperor often went on and on about how much he distrusted ‘the gays’ because they were so unmanly. Pavlos had told Dorn that at least in a clone prison, among his family, nobody would care what they did. He was right. We brothers generally do not care about our differences. Every brother wanted to be more individual.  
  
Dorn sighed impatiently. I’d given him a better script than the one the pirates had. “Alright. We’ll pay it as soon as we conduct our exit interview and make sure you didn’t rape her.”  
  
“Wait, what?” the pirate asked. He wasn’t posturing anymore, he was too surprised.  
  
“It’s under statute fifty-seven-hundred-dash-three-thousand-eighty-five-bee of the rules for operating as government contractors. Imperial law states that to receive rewards for returning fugitives, independent contractors must handle prisoners in a rape free fashion for payment to be approved. Imperial Conventions insist on the strictest morality.” Dorn said flatly.  
  
“Well, how can you know?” Pirate looked confused. He looked at his associate, who offered no help.  
  
“We’ll ask her,” Dorn looked positively wicked. He was able to imitate those soulless Imperial eyes perfectly.  
  
“But…but she ain’t exactly well disposed towards us. Of course she’ll say yes. What happens if she says we did?” The pirate looked at his associate.  
  
The associate looked like he was shitting himself but was hoping no one else could smell it. That’s because he knew what Dorn had said was absolutely true, but most Imperials didn’t bother enforcing it. Therefore most crooks didn’t know about it.  
  
“Why, execution of course. We can’t have a band of rapists running around,” Dorn pointed two fingers towards the sky and made a circular motion. I pinged a signal over my com. My flagship, a stolen Imperial cruiser, fell out of hyperspace.  
  
“What?” The bandit looked around. His associates looked as surprised as he was.  
  
“You’re in our tractor beam,” Dorn announced. “Now drop your shields and prepare to be boarded.”  
  
I pinged a response over my helmet com and my brother Pavlos hit the detonator.  
  
A low vibration, like a singular rumble reverberated from the pirate vessel. Suddenly the pirates’ holograms looked disoriented. Some covered their ears. Some projectily vomited. They all looked dizzy and disoriented. Most closed their eyes.  
  
Low frequency sonic disruptor. At its higher levels, such a weapon could disintegrate its victims. This one was non-lethal. I’d rigged one up to emit a pulse through a ship and Pavlos had been attaching it to their ship while they were talking to us. The experimental weapon had worked well in the lab, but this was the first field test. The frequency shorted out their shields. It also had effects on humans. Symptoms include loss of balance, nausea, motion sickness, headaches, blurred vision. I remembered them all. We clones had had training in withstanding non-lethal sonic disruptors back in the academy. I told my friend the Emperor about the things they used to do to us and he just shrugged and said, ‘That which does not kill us, makes us stronger’. That sounds cute as a motto for bad beer or a dive bar, but I would have preferred if someone had asked before hitting me with a sonic disruptor. Maybe waited until I was at least physiologically an adult before they did it. We were two years old, for shit’s sake.  
  
The Imperial shuttle we were on flew directly at the pirates’ hangar bay. It was a bumpy ride. I had let my foster sons fly it as a way to keep them off the front lines. I had told them to stay in the ship when they insisted on being in the skirmish. They were Mandalorian boys, it would have been dishonorable to them not to be a part of the fight. Problem was, they were sixteen, fourteen, and twelve standard human years. Boys that age fly too fast.  
  
After a screeching landing, our landing ramp opened and my crew spilled out firing. Three of us were in the lead, wearing the Stormtrooper armor to provide some cover. This was habit, we had always been taught that the armored lead and protect those who aren’t. But Stormtrooper armor is garbage, so it probably didn’t help. We were followed by Dorn in his ISB uniform, and the rest of my brothers, dressed in their typically bad fashion choices.  
  
I began taking out bandits left and right with my rifle. I liked to aim for eyes, but the stinking foggy ass helmet was ruining my accuracy. I kept hitting other parts of their faces. That armor was only useful as a costume. All around us, the pirates were stumbling and puking from the effects of the disruptor. Easy prey, like a herd of deer that you’ve already set the hounds to hobble.  
  
My friend the Emperor used to talk a lot about his old days, hunting animals for sport. He always said I should try it. But after you’ve been hunted, as I had many times in the army, stalking and killing just to show dominance lost its appeal, I thought. He and Tarkin would go on and on about hunting. I knew Moff Tarkin was a hardcore survivalist type. The crowning achievement of his childhood was killing a troop of semi-sentient primates. I appreciated him being cool in a crisis, when I met him, we had to run for our lives when the prison set the literal hounds on us. He really did accept the rule of survival of the strongest, or in his case, because his physique was a little lacking, survival of the smartest and most ruthless. He lacked all empathy. The Twi’lek prostitutes on Coruscant insisted that if anyone had a murder basement, it was Tarkin.  
  
The pirate captain and his associates would be on the bridge. Once the hangar was secured, I led the way. A second shuttle arrived from the cruiser and made a smooth landing. Another detachment deboarded and began making their way towards the detention level.  
  
The portal to the bridge was locked down. I jerked my head towards it and my brother Blue came forward. He always had explosives that he carried around in a sack. I think he did that so that during every battle he could make the same quips.  
  
He tossed a round charge that split open on impact and stuck to the door panel. “Have a taste of my sack, shitstains,” he said as he hit the detonator. I didn’t say his sack quips were good. But the door panel was mangled wreckage immediately.  
  
“Good job, Blue.” I said and went through the portal. The pirate’s crew started screaming as a Stormtrooper in a poncho entered and was aiming at them with an antique rifle.  
  
Some of my brothers had followed me in and aimed their weapons. I lowered mine and took off the stupid Stormtrooper helmet.  
  
I looked closely at the associate of the pirate captain again. He wasn’t retching. He looked dizzy, but I suspected he’d had training.  
  
I could finally see clearly. His gloves. Fingerless models cut from a brand I was familiar with. I looked at his fingers. The nails. Pirates are often malnourished because a crew of guys with no supervision eats like a bunch of little boys left unattended. Lots of white spots on nails from iron deficiencies. Or dirt or stains from spice resin. Not this guy. Then I noticed a tan line on his finger in a distinctive shape.  
  
I turned to another man dressed as a Stormtrooper. “Besh, have you jammed their transmissions?”  
  
“Yes, Warden Commander. They won’t be able to tell anyone they’ve been overpowered.”  
  
“Alright, we have a few minutes.” The Imperials were probably waiting for a signal once this setup was over. “Get this thing hotwired and we’ll get it back home.” I pointed at the pirate captain and his associate. “Hold these two guys back.”  
  
Only the associate spoke, “Hold us back from what?” Pirates know when to shut up.  
  
I headed for the door.  
  
“You going to get her yourself?” Dorn asked.  
  
“What kind of man would I be if I let someone else do it?” I loaded a new plasma cartridge in my rifle.  
  
“Should we…not…tell your wife you used the sonic disruptor, knowing she was on the ship?” He joked.  
  
“She may be leader of the settlement, but I am in control when it comes to security. I made an executive decision that was safest for all of us.” I did my best to look tough in front of my crew.  
  
My brother Blue shook his head at me. “You’re terrified of her, aren’t you?”  
  
“Please don’t tell her!” I laughed, “She’ll be furious.”  
  
I handed Blue my Stormtrooper helmet and he strapped it to his belt. I’d borrowed the Stormtrooper armor from him. All of my brothers that survived the war were conscripted, but I had tossed that junk armor down a garbage chute the minute my friend the Emperor had hired me to work for the ISB.  
  
When my crew used our classic ‘Imperials’ routine, we didn’t have enough sets of Stormtrooper armor to all wear a set. And nobody ever wanted to, since as I said, it’s garbage. I would wear the greaves and boots, but I would never put that trash on my chest. Nobody noticed, since I just threw a poncho over it. The costume simply confused them, but nobody ever asked about it. I think it’s since there is no reason a Stormtrooper COULDN’T wear one. It just isn’t customary. At most they go, ‘huh, good for him, trying something different.’ You’d be surprised how little people question the things around them. I don’t understand lack of curiosity, I truly don’t.  
  
I could still wear armor, because unlike some of my dear brothers, I had not let myself get all doughy. My friend the Emperor used to greet me with a certain amount of envy because I kept fit. ‘My goodness, my dear boy,’ he’d say, then comment on my body in a way that creeped me out for some reason. He’d touched my abs once and it made me really uncomfortable. But what can you say when the ruler of the galaxy does something like that? He gets a pass. He’d always tell me not to take my health for granted. I understood that part. He looked like a human fungus.  
  
Leaving my brothers on the bridge to deal with the prisoners, I took Shizla and Blue with me to the detention level, or rather, they automatically followed. It was as if I had them caught in tractor beams, I thought, as we crossed the hallway to the lift. Outside the trasparisteel port, I could see our flagship waiting, holding us in place. Our flagship had been a beautiful brand new Imperial freighter. A local bureaucrat was using it to go around the Leritor system and demand bribes from people. Like going into a village and demanding fees to issue zoning permits for their homes, otherwise he’d level them. And people had to pay, since this guy was the legal government representative. When I was made aware of this scheme, we offered this bureaucrat a bribe in the form of some crates of spice, and then included a crate of Geonosian mind worms. Then we waited and let everybody on board die a heinous death. Once the fuel ran out, the cold killed the worms, but that took longer than I’d calculated. Our women had held a full on exorcism/victory party in the ship afterwards, since the incredible smell it had acquired seemed almost supernatural. They’d had an animal sacrifice and put bloody handprints all over the interior. That did nothing to improve the stench. All over it, the upholstery acquired little singes from where my crew had dropped their spice ash at the party. This is why I can’t have nice vehicles.  
  
I was sure the real Imperials were expecting a signal from their agent for when they could come and round up the survivors. I hoped we’d be parsecs away by the time they got here. My ship knew its protocol was to drop us and run at the first sign of Imperials and we would figure our own way out. That was my order. Better some survive than lose all in a shootout. We were only a few thousand, we couldn’t really afford to take huge losses just to rescue one person.  
  
The lift arrived and we boarded.  
  
I looked up and took a deep breath. I was thanking the Force my wife was found. I wasn’t religious, but I knew crystal clearly that I was grateful to something that she was alright. Grateful that my plan had come off so far. I had put up that wanted poster as a security measure. That way, if anyone ever took her, they’d contact me on that com signature right away and I’d hopefully get her back alive. I believe in preparedness. Even small children can be taught some measures to defend themselves in case of an emergency.  
  
On Coruscant, when I lived there, there were plenty of public service announcements on the holo-vid channels telling kids not to talk to strangers. Yeah, the statistical likelihood of a child kidnapping by a stranger was slim, but it gives you peace of mind that the kid would recognize a bad guy and know what to do. You don’t want people helpless. Lina was a civilian she didn’t have training. She kept mostly to affairs within our settlement. Making the peace in conflicts. Listening to people. Telling me what they wanted and then helping me to figure out what to do about it. I didn’t know anyone else that could have done that. I didn’t have patience for most people’s opinions.  
  
After our conversation with the pirate leader, some things were learned. It had been set up to look like a random crime, as if they didn’t know that the village was our home, and that the security force of the settlement, my crew, would be away. They knew I’d come for her because they knew who she was and that this specifically would provoke me to deal with it myself. They had expected that I would be at the rendezvous point. We had boarded ships with our ‘Imperials’ routine before. We confused smugglers by extorting toll taxes for the use of trade routes, something real Imperials often did. Then we overpowered the ships’ crews and marooned them on other worlds. We usually gave them a way to send a message so they could get picked up, but we’d be long gone with their ships.  
  
The Empire must have told these pirates that this scheme was low risk for them. But this time, the ‘Imperials’, my crew, stalled them by making them worried they were dealing with real Imperials. When the pirate captain had told his crew to lockdown the detention level, I knew he was hoping that’s all we were, so he could collect his bounty and go. We had instead told them we were going to execute them. The guy in the fingerless gloves was still not sure we weren’t Imperials and he could not blow his cover. He was an ISB agent, I had realized. ISB agents do actually sometimes meet with bounty hunters alone to turn in prisoners, and then kill them and collect the bounty themselves. Most criminals didn’t know about that scheme, since there aren’t any guys around who complain. That was one of my favorite things to do in the ISB. I hate bounty hunters. I was hoping to someday meet my little shit of a brother, Boba.  
  
The pirates and their associate didn’t expect the disruptor. Like I said, it was new. Thankfully, I’d had that. Extracting prisoners alive is messy. As I said, the real Imperials would be along. We didn’t have time to screw around. My friend the Emperor said that the only thing we all must accept is time. He was as bad as General Yoda with his pontificating quotes like that. It was funny, though, since he said it like that pissed him off.  
  
My brother Blue had actually followed what was happening because I had told him my plan. He was always ready with his explanation of why things were happening. He only had one explanation for everything. He had seen the attack as a part of a conspiracy against us clones. He thought everything was a conspiracy against clones.  
  
“They knew who she was, they’s only doing this to you because you’re a clone. They wouldn’t do to an enbee like that. Enbees are sick.” Enbee, or N.B. was our way of saying the natural born. ie, not clones. “Who would do something like this? It’s downright barbaric! Decent folk don’t act this way to each other.” Blue frowned. He was making that face, deeply creasing those wrinkles we all have on our foreheads. It meant he was stressed. When my brother Blue was stressed, he talked. Nonstop. About the same things over and over.  
  
Right then I didn’t need his crap. I was making that face myself. I had known the Imperials would come after me sooner or later. I had disobeyed my friend the Emperor and that he could not let pass.  
  
Blue insisted on going on. “I mean, who? Everybody knows there are some things you don’t do.”  
  
“I hate it when you say, ‘everybody knows’. You always say that when you spout some deig thing.” Shizla had just used a rude slur for clones. ‘Deig’ was an ancient word that meant ‘to mold’ or ‘to form’. As clones were manufactured humans, it wasn’t technically incorrect. But it was usually used as an insult. It wasn’t as offensive as some things people called us. Anyway, Shizla was part of our crew, so a family member. Once us deigs started wanting to spend time with women, as is customary among humans, we couldn’t really stay too true to our original deig code, Brothers before Others. When we were in Kamino, it had made sense, brothers had been the only ones we could trust because that was how it was. Our cloners and trainers posed a constant threat to us. Banding together was survival. Eventually, when we got out into the universe, we learned to love other people. We had to change our way of thinking and being and change our definitions. We knew Shizla didn’t mean ‘deig’ as an insult, it could mean a lot of things depending on how you said it. Among us, since brothers made up our majority, women used ‘deig’ more often than not to mean ‘man’, but mildly disparagingly.  
  
Shizla had spent her entire career as a pirate. In that world, she’d seen what people would do for money, or for fun. She still thought the pirates were nothing more than unlucky thugs. She didn’t have a high opinion of men’s intelligence. “Plenty of people do things like that. You deigs think everyone fights all civilized. Getting power over people’s women is normal among some folk. Just like taking people’s children or forcing people to have your children. You ask me, she wasn’t part of their plan, but they decided to go with it because they are a bunch of pigs.”  
  
Blue just ignored her. As I said, clones are terrible listeners. “How could they think we’d fall for that?” He would have if I hadn’t explained it to him beforehand. “Their story made no sense. A raid from their sector would barely be worth the cost of their fuel.” He had a point. Blue shrugged his rifle on his shoulder. “I guarantee you, they just come here to get us. They want to kill us, every single last one. They’d be damned if they ever let a brother get ahead.” My friend the Emperor never made exterminating the clones an overt policy of his, but as head of state of the Republic, he was technically our guardian. He could have emancipated us at any time and given us a chance. He never did me any real favors, but always managed to imply that I was in his debt. Yet, he didn’t get rid of us. My friend the Emperor never got rid of things that he thought might be useful to him. His private quarters looked like he was a hoarder and he always smelled from the old clothes he hardly ever changed. His pet cyborg Darth Vader smelled even worse.  
  
What Blue didn’t know was that crimes like these were widespread up until the recent past, just as it still was among people Shizla knew. Blue had always been a ward of the state, first in the academy, then in the army, then in prison. He was kind of sheltered. He never knew what people would do if they were starving to death. My friend the Emperor told me that people were basically evil and would always want to hurt others if they could. I had asked what we could do about it and he said that people would never be made to change anything unless someone else took control and made them do what was right. The only thing saving people from themselves was the threat of punishment. To punish was power. Power allowed you to make people be good by taking away their options. What he didn’t say was that power actually allowed you to make people be any way you wanted them to be. My old friend the Emperor also said that no one is in control until they can clearly see all the pieces in on the game board. Otherwise, you are in somebody else’s game.  
  
“I’m just saying. It’s an all-male crew. We say, if a crew won’t hire any women, you can tell what’s on their minds. Indiscriminate raping.” My captain Shizla was Weequay. She didn’t mince words. Her accent was heavy, so she trilled her Reshes and had a flamboyant intonation.  
  
I gave her a look that said she wasn’t helping. She could read clone facial sign language enough to know what it meant. But she had a point. My friend the Emperor was sadistic. He at least would have loved to send the absolute worst people to do his jobs for him.  
  
“Oh, back to your women good, men bad narrative again! We’re not all monsters.” Blue and Shizla had broken up their personal relationship a few months before, so they were a little raw.  
  
The lights blinked and the lift slowed, then turned back on. The ship was a total piece of junk. Lots of work to be done to get it fixed up. The crew always had fun working on a new ship together. But at that moment the bad lighting was giving me a headache. “Damnit, Blue, don’t you know the rectangle example when you hear it?”  
  
Blue scratched his head under his hat. “We don’t all have your fancy leadership academy education, Cody.”  
  
I took a breath, “What she means is, she ain’t saying all guys are rapists, but I’ll be damned if she’s wrong that almost all rapists are guys. So you can assume that an all-male crew will have a statistically higher proportion of rapists than a crew composed of a random cross section. Then you can deduce that it might be by design even if you can’t assign agency. Why you gotta take it personally?” Fancy leadership academy education indeed.  
  
We rode on in surprised silence for a bit.  
  
Of course Blue started again, “See I would just feel less picked on if she didn’t act so excessively.”  
  
“Stop being such a wuss,” Shizla nearly yelled. She unholstered her pistols while scowling at Blue. One of the downsides of working with family is the personal drama. We clones were used to it, of course, but we were taught to repress our emotions. We rarely had fighting among the ranks in the field. Weequay, in particular, did not share that social norm.  
  
The door to the lift slid open and we entered the hallway to the brig. Smoke was everywhere, from the blaster fire hitting the walls and heating pipes. I had some former Stormtroopers on my crew. The kind of yokels they conscripted and barely trained couldn’t hit the side of a Tatooine sandcrawler. But they could hit anything that would be sure to fill the corridors with smoke or steam.  
  
“Is this corridor secure, Osk?” I asked, my rifle at my shoulder shaking my head at the mess.  
  
“Yes, Warden Commander. The door to the detention corridor is there.” This kid’s skin got positively pink between the freckles when he was excited. Sweated a ton.  
  
“I’ll take the lead.” I moved to the side of the door. I pointed at the door with a flick of my head and Blue set the charge on the panel.  
  
Blue hit the detonator and blew a hole where the brig door once was. We charged into the outer room and I shot each of the guards between the eyes with my rifle. Shizla holstered her guns and pulled out a knife. She stabbed each guard in turn, to make sure they were really dead, I guess. She gave it a few tries. Blue shook his head at her in disbelief. She wrinkled her nose at him.  
  
“We gotta find out which cell this wife of yours is in.” Blue approached the command console for the cells.  
  
I grabbed a maintenance wrench off the wall, walked over to the console and smashed it apart. All the cell doors opened.  
  
“Speaking of being excessive.” Blue shouted after me as I headed for the cells.  
  
I walked slowly down the narrow corridor between cells. “Are you there?”  
  
“Cody?” I heard my wife, speaking through tears.  
  
I found her in a cell curled up in a corner and holding her ears. I tossed my rifle and wrench aside and entered her cell. She flew into my arms, trembling like a tooka when you take it for a speeder ride. I tried that once, never again. Lina sobbed noises into my poncho that sounded not unlike those made by a tooka in a speeder.  
  
I hugged her close. “Did they hurt you?”  
  
She lifted her head from my shoulder and wiped her hair out of her face. “They said they might if I didn’t do what they said. I did like you always told me and didn’t give them any reason.” I had taught her what to do if anyone ever held a gun on her.  
  
I breathed a sigh of relief and crushed her head to my heart.  
  
She wrapped her arms around my neck. “I don’t know what happened, I felt sick all of a sudden. I couldn’t stop throwing up.”  
  
“You’ll be fine Alor b’ner kar’ta. I’ve got you.” The effects of the sonic distruptor would only last a few hours.  
  
I lifted her into my arms and carried her out of there, past the steam and smoke. Past the bodies of the enemy dead. Past my brothers and my crew, who erupted in cheers and blaster waving at the sight of us. The ship roared to life and we sped off into hyperspace. Objectives achieved. Not a single casualty on our side. It was a good mission.  
  
\--  
  
I carried my wife to my shuttle in the hangar bay. The medical droid treated her for the effects of the weapon. He gave her a sedative and a brain scan.  
  
I turned to my foster son, speaking in Mando’a, “Sh’ehn, take care of Lina until I get back. She’ll feel better in a few hours, she’ll probably just need sleep. If she wakes up, there will be some sensitivity to light, that’s normal. She might be disoriented, maybe spotty memory at first. She could get dehydrated if she sleeps too long, so give her an intra-venous. Make sure that medical droid is monitoring.”  
  
He nodded. I kissed my sleeping wife, then left the ship. Blue and Shizla were waiting at the foot of the ramp. Blue was carrying my rifle and the wrench. I took the wrench from him and he handed my gun off to Goran, Sh’ehn’s foster brother. Like any juvenile delinquent, Goran brandished the gun in a manner he thought was cool. It was an improper way to hold a weapon, so Blue adjusted him and gave a nod at his work.  
  
Other brothers told stories about that gun. ‘Ne’tra’, or ‘Blackie’, as I called my rifle, was a classic DC-15A. It was my favorite of my issued weapons through the whole war. I never lost it because when I was fighting, I never let anyone take it from me. I loved that gun. Yes, all my guns had names. My sidearm these days was a pistol named ‘Bantov’. ‘Nevertheless’, I called him, because he was the rebuttal to any argument.  
  
Now that I was sure my wife was safe, I was free to enjoy the rush of battle. I used to hate battles where I had to run things from behind the front lines at a command center or filling out equipment requisition forms. The endless administrative protocols in the army drove me to distraction. Life was simpler in the Outer Rim, you got to do more. More like in the field. Give orders, people listen. If they don’t listen, they might die. Either that or you die. So to stay alive, you have to do a good enough job that people are loyal. It helped to be able to think creatively and adapt. This type of high risk life is what we clones were engineered for. My friend the Emperor had told me once that you’ll never be free of stupid rules, so you had to be the one making the rules. His rule was simple. He did whatever the hell he wanted and so did everyone else.  
  
Just because I didn’t like administrative work myself didn’t mean I was against good organization. I hated the Republic administrative systems because they were so damned inefficient. They were the type of thing that you’d expect that had been created by committee, like a team building a house where everyone was using a different plan and had different demands. Every Republic bureaucrat got input on what they wanted, leaving it confused and contradictory at times, and only benefitting those who drafted the system. It made life impossible for people like me who were supposed to execute on it. My friend the Emperor always promised to do something about bureaucracy but it never seemed to change. When he wanted something, he didn’t have to worry about oversight. I do believe that the governmental system that my friend the Emperor presided over was exactly the one he wanted. It kept people confused and bickering, competing for his approval and terrified of his wrath.  
  
I set up my system myself. Back in our village, and with my crew, I maintained a democracy of sorts, even though they usually ended up just asking me to decide things. I planned and led missions, but I never did anything without saying why I was doing it. My power came because I got results. My good friend the Emperor once told me, back before the war, when he was the Chancellor, that all anyone in power fears is losing his power. I can see why. Most people are idiots. If you let everyone really have an equal say, you have chaos. That’s not good for anybody. Advocating for total equality is like saying my tooka and I are equally capable at what we do. But I can’t lick my own ass. And I wouldn’t let my tooka drive a speeder, for instance. If being in a tooka driven speeder is what it feels like losing power, then yes, yes, I am afraid of that.  
  
In my organization, I found it was very important to find the right jobs for people. I looked across the hangar bay where our organization’s treasurer was going over the spoils to decide what to keep or sell. Niki was counting a gigantic pile of credits in front of a row of tough looking brothers. Given her choice of outfit and staging, Niki as usual looked like she was filming some Twi’lek rap video.  
  
Niki didn’t get involved with the violent side of our work, she didn’t really like hurting people. Back in the day, she had taken out a few speeder windshields with sporting equipment, but that was about money. Business was business and she was strictly mercenary. I had put her in charge of our assets. As long as I’d known her, Niki had been a tireless businesswoman. Managing talent, drugs, and entertainment. She’d had quite the little empire before she was arrested on Coruscant and sent to a prison on Ragoon IV. She’d been taken by the prison warden as a comfort woman, because most Imperial prison wardens do that. When we came to get her out of there, she immediately grabbed old Bantov out of its holster and shot the warden seven times in the dick. The way he screamed. We just let him die slowly. When Niki had come with us after, she looked a little scared at herself. She told me she thought she might have unresolved anger issues. For all her quirks, everyone loved her. You’d never want to have a party without her. I also let her handle negotiations with other criminal enterprises. As sexy as she was, she was just what most pirates wanted to be negotiating with.  
  
Behind her, my brothers started unloading some shipping crates they’d found. “Hey Cody!” Niki took out a blaster and posed aiming it at me, making a pouty mouth. They were real Blastechs. Not your run of the mill hardware. Credits and guns. The Imperials had evidently paid these guys to come and get me. Blue was right, economically, this seemed excessive. It was way more than the three million credit bounty the Empire was offering on me.  
  
“Pew, pew!” Niki pretended to fire at me. I suddenly knew how I wanted to proceed.  
  
“Yes, very inspirational. Put that down, Niki, before you hurt somebody.” It was not phrased as an order, I knew better than that. More as a joke. The brothers behind her were cringing every time she moved and the gun wasn’t even loaded. Watching a man with his dick shot off die slowly is the kind of thing that sticks with you. She pulled a face with wide eyes and stuck her tongue out in my direction.  
  
\--  
  
I had just sent my foster sons on with Niki and our loot and get them back to our hideout. We had to be ready to withstand a siege if my friend the Emperor retaliated. I suspected he would disavow this failed mission. But I couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t just decide to wipe us off the map. Tarkin had always advised his friends to keep a year’s worth of food in their basements. I knew that certain friends of his owned canned good companies. A lot of people who supported my friend the Emperor thought that they’d be ready to survive it if everything went to hell. Better prepared than others, anyway. More likely to survive because they have access to some secret information and therefore they would be spared the coming hardship. You could hear them talk about it. Every time they feel helpless or angry. Whenever they felt envious or wrathful at their neighbors, they told themselves that they’d be the ones laughing at their neighbors’ misfortunes someday. I was never ready to go quite that far, but there was something to be said for preparedness.  
  
We’d taken the pirate ship and our prisoners off for processing. I landed the ship and went back to the hangar bay to find my people. “How is it going?”  
  
Shizla indicated a direction with her thumb. “We figured it was best to proceed somewhere we could put a tarp down or hose out, since we’re keeping the ship after. So we took them to the kitchen.” That surprised me, Shizla and her fellow Weequay ladies had a lot of practical experience, but clean they were not.  
  
“Who came up with that idea?” I had my suspicions.  
  
“That was on my directive.” Blue admitted. Most clones are tidy to a fault. We were raised in a laboratory.  
  
\--  
  
I looked out across the lake to where the mountains of Rishi stretched up into the distance, planning. I liked the way they looked, with snow on them. Where I grew up, we only had rain. We certainly didn’t have any landforms. We lived mostly indoors. I liked to get outside when I could in my work.  
  
The spot was on the edge of our territory. We had constructed a marker there to warn away encroachers from our hideout in the mountain village. It wasn’t a total secret we were there, but our people behaved in innocuous ways on the planet. We were generally well known and well thought of by the other people on Rishi. But we discouraged visitors. They might have heard stories about the things we did, but those things were done far away and out in space. The people of our planet only saw the benefit. If we had money to spend, they had things to sell us. We’d share our supplies or donate money for them to build the things they needed. My wife made visits around to ask about people’s families or to see what help they wanted.  
  
I had set myself up more or less as a ruler, although I don’t call myself that. Telling everybody what they must call you is an assertion of dominance, but also a sign of weakness, because it shows you don’t want criticism. We clones were aware of that at an early age. We spent our years in Kamino calling each other whatever we wanted, making fun of each other. Eventually you just gave up and got in on the joke. Keep your family around you, and you can’t stay thin skinned. They will tell you the truth. The thing my friend the Emperor never learned was that people can call you what they want to whether you like it or not. If their names hurt you, they have power over you. My friend the Emperor looked like a pompous jackass declaring himself ‘Emperor’, I thought. He never let anyone tell him the truth about himself. Even if you don’t think it’s entirely fair, you have to know that criticism is at least somebody’s truth.  
  
Taking criticism well is a surprisingly rare trait. I know some Hutts who respond to criticism by feeding you to a desert sandworm that has a metabolism as slow as a flytrap plant. You just hang there for days, impaled on teeth, slowly dying in agony from its nerve toxin, before the thing submerges you in its digestive enzymes and your tissue turns to goop. Hutts will say this process takes a thousand years. But Huttese is prone to hyperbolic metaphors, as one would expect from a culture where acting tough is required. You can’t digest something over a thousand years, it will rot away before then, leaving no nutritional value. It only takes a couple days to die. I’ve heard it hurts, though. And that you shit yourself, several times, before disintegrating into what is basically a soup of your own shit. My brother Wolffe always said this had to be the worst way to die that he’d ever heard of, and he knew all kinds of disgusting ways. He had written a rhyming poem of all kinds of nasty methods of death. He’d recite it at clone gatherings where we were all drunk. We’d beat on the tables with our fists and recite along the parts we knew. When he performed it, he’d often improvise bits, with musical notes. Those made the rounds among us, as we memorized them and sang them together. Niki does a rendition of this that is even better than Wolffe’s. And she once did a dirty version about all the worst ways to be screwed. It was a real eye opener for some deigs.  
  
I was thinking about this strike by the Empire. It wasn’t unexpected. My friend the Emperor could have come for me any time. He’d always known where I was. He’d sent me there.  
  
I’d been disobedient to him and was sent to Rishi to run a military prison. I was marooned out there like everyone else. The Outer Rim had become quite lawless after the war. The Empire claimed it fell under their jurisdiction, like the rest of the galaxy, but they didn’t have the resources or the desire to police it very well. The Empire didn’t provide the people with anything, not even protection. But collected their taxes and conscripted labor just fine. Out here, the only way for social advancement was through means that were outside the system. In this type of situation, where the modes of state fail, demand still exists. The mechanisms of the economy revert to a more primitive state. Direct bartering, personal deal making, opportunistic labor, smuggling. A real gangster’s paradise.  
  
When I was forced to leave Coruscant in disgrace, my friend the Emperor, put me in charge of a place that was populated mostly by my own brothers. The potential to create a well-trained militia had presented itself to me. No one else seemed to see the potential in us clones, but most people didn’t have the benefit of an education like I’d had. Hence my crew.  
  
We had started small. At the beginning, the prison guards and I took the arsenal of weapons that the prison possessed, and we demanded some local spice miners pay us protection from the proceeds. They said they were paying already to another organization, but they were willing to trade up. We hunted down the local bandits inherited their territory. We lowered the monthly fees they were collecting. Everyone was happy.  
  
Next, we took control of the prison fuel mine. We stopped paying our quota to the Empire and, as punishment, we received no new supplies. They thought we’d starve out there. Instead, by masquerading as bully Imperials we stole a good portion of the droids and machines from a facility on Anoat. We got our mine running self-sufficiently. From there, we gradually took over all of the mining interests in worlds nearby our system by force. We simply stormed into the mining colonies with guns and took out the leadership. We literally took them out and dropped them off cliffs and the like in front of the factory laborers. The laborers always cheered. Then we told the workers that they were with us now. We always improved working conditions immediately. Then we made workers the owners of the operations and they sent us a portion of their profits. The Mining Guild might have complained to the Empire, but none of these worlds wanted the Guild to come back. The endeavors were no longer profitable so the Guild cut their losses. This is common among business interests, like the Mining Guild or the Trade Federation, or Weequay pirates. Those types knew how to take losses. I liked enemies that weren’t driven by primitive things like revenge. It seemed so much more civilized. Those people could be reasoned with.  
  
Once I’d severed ties, the Empire had declared us traitors and they really did have bounties out on all of us. This made sense as a way of disposing of me cheaply. Let someone else get me if they could, but they didn’t have to commit their resources to it and someone else shouldered all the risk. It showed they didn’t care much what I did as long as I wasn’t inconvenient. But I’d remained. And thrived. And rose.  
  
Now my friend the Emperor had ordered for me to be taken out. Guys like him have to have their way about everything. The only way to keep him happy was to convince him that you were doing just what he wanted you to. The hard part was knowing what that really was.  
  
My brothers came down the ramp with the two crates and set them on the ground between the ships. I sat down on one of the crates and our prisoners were brought before me. The two from the bridge were the only ones left after the kitchen interrogations. Those had been over quickly, there wasn’t much to sort out. None of those monkey-lizards knew anything of value to me. I wasn’t in a recruiting mood. The guys hadn’t impressed me. Plus what Shizla said.  
  
So we took care of them. Then we had to do the processing. My people were openly mocking me for this plan. But they cleaned up my bloody mess. That’s the kind of thing only family can help with. Shizla and the girls had a few things to say about how excessive deigs were.  
  
Our remaining prisoners didn’t look too much the worse for wear, although I knew my brothers who were guarding them wouldn’t be too nice. The men looked like they knew enough to be afraid. It wasn’t as if pirates like us adhered to the Imperial Conventions of Warfare or anything. We could be ruthless despite Shizla’s accusation of the deiginess of our tactics. In this context, deig can also mean ‘weak’.  
  
My friend the Emperor had cared enough about me to bring in some hired thugs and use them to lure me out. It wasn’t too expensive, by Imperial standards. And the Empire was pretty well insulated from it. Even if the mission was a failure they had learned about me. I had to send them my own message. I had learned from them too. I was playing this game.  
  
I spoke to the pirate captain, but loud enough that his associates and my men could hear, “So, friend, I know who you are. I assume you know who I am, since your associate here told you.” I did know of this pirate, too, even though I’d never met him. I made it my business to know competition. I had a trained some of my men in intelligence gathering. Plenty of brothers knew how to spy from the war. Information is a commodity.  
  
“We don’t know who you are.” The pirate’s associate put in. “If you let us go, we won’t be able to report you.” He was still trying to negotiate a way out of this. Entitled white boys who’d gone to high class universities on Coruscant always try to talk their way out of trouble. The Republic Navy during the war, for example, didn’t have many consequences for when their cadets got out of line. They never wanted to ‘ruin the boy’s life’. It was one of the many ways you can spot a real Imperial agent when you see one. Anyone who belonged to a pirate crew in the Outer Rim would have already known when to shut up.  
  
“Well that’s the thing, mate. You’ve seen where I live.” I looked at the wrench. It was a real Wrecking Droid wrench. Core manufacture. Nice. The Outer Rim only got the cheapest, crappiest manufactured goods. Well made things were valuable. I decided I might display the wrench on the wall in my garage and encourage people to ask questions about it. “For all I’ve known, you’ve seen my base. You’ve seen what defenses we have. I can’t let that intel get back.”  
  
“We just stumbled across that village.” The pirate leader stuck to the script half-heartedly. He was probably promised the Empire would rescue him too. What he didn’t know was that my friend the Emperor didn’t like loose ends. This guy was disposable from the beginning. I needed him to know that before he’d flip on his friend there.  
  
I stood up and the pirate’s associate involuntarily took a step backwards because I was brandishing the wrench. I’d always enjoyed aggressive interrogations. It really allowed me to use my creativity. Interrogations are ninety-percent psychological, so there is a competition to it, like sports matches. One objective is to make the interrogee as scared as possible. The best way to do that is to keep them disoriented so they don’t know what to expect. Back when I worked in black ops for the Imperial Security Bureau after the war, my men used to take bets on whether I could get a guy to piss himself with fear. Getting physical is a last resort, but that could be fun, too. I liked having props that would imply that I might get physical. It gave me something to do with my hands and it distracted the hell out of them. Some, like the wrench, were obvious. Sometimes, just to change it up, I tried to make the props as confusing as possible. This one time, we were interrogating this terrorism suspect and I just asked him questions while holding a raw tuber. I think he thought it was funny until I threw it at his face. I’m a Jango Fett clone, not a damned Imperial Stormtrooper. My aim is accurate. My brothers wouldn’t stop laughing about how big his nose swelled up, but he gave up the intel.  
  
I paced past our ‘guests’. They didn’t dare try anything with all my brothers around us brandishing blasters. I found this intimidated people, which we brothers found hilarious because any deig knows better than to fire weapons while standing in a semi-circle. It was a psych out.  
  
I believed that the associate of the pirate captain was an Imperial Security Bureau agent, posing as a recruit, providing training and advice to accomplish their real objective. It was his plan. It was his bad script. His intention, I knew, was killing or capturing me. I had identified him from the gloves. The gloves were just wrong. No self-respecting pirate wears gloves like that. They were made of a distinctive type of leather. From a special breed of Naboo shaaks. They were from a store on Coruscant that made theirs with a thin line of red piping on the seam. It was where students from fancy colleges on Coruscant shopped. They cost fifteen thousand credits a pair and this guy had cut the fingers off. It could have been an emblem, ISB agents often wear certain things known only to other agents so that, if they meet undercover, fewer agents will be killed in friendly fire. This was based on my recommendation back when I worked missions for the ISB. My friend the Emperor’s Inquisitors Squad didn’t usually leave survivors otherwise. We lost more than our share of agents to those religious nutcases. In the ISB, the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing but we all knew where the head was. In a certain orifice. I wonder if my friend the Emperor ever really could keep track of all his game pieces. That gets harder as you age, believe me I know.  
  
I tapped the wrench on one of the crates that had held the new blasters. The other had held explosives. Now they were ours. I already had a few ideas about what to do with them. I was going to call my new blaster ‘Stranger’, as in you better not be talking to him. We had refilled these two crates with a surprise.  
  
I had a thermal detonator in my other hand, so I held it up. “So these weapons…that’s some nice very new hardware you guys had. Imperial issue?”  
  
“They’re stolen, we got them from Grakkus the Hutt on Smuggler’s Moon,” the pirate’s associate confessed right on script.  
  
“That blob of blubber! We’ll make him pay for this!” my brother Blue lunged at the pirate. This was a lie, but Blue didn’t realize it. I’d have to explain it later.  
  
The ISB agent had flinched. Everybody knows that clones know how to administer an effective and artful beating. My friend the Emperor had always complimented my ability to do so. He had always insisted that I film my aggressive interrogations to ‘be sure I followed protocol’. I got the uncomfortable feeling somehow that he would watch them alone later for fun.  
  
I slapped Blue lightly on the chest with my open palm, “It’s alright, brother.” I turned back to look at the associate, rather, the Imperial agent.  
  
He was a little too eager to give us the intel, to deflect the blame or send me to do something stupid, like make a move against a Hutt. And those gloves. And the fact that the weapons were Imperial. And his finger. Once I’d looked at the gloves before, I looked closer. There was a tan line on his finger in a distinctive shape. It looked as if, until recently, he habitually wore a type of ring. Now, pirates often have flourishes, but this one I recognized. It was two links of chain wrapped around the finger. This was an emblem that my friend the Emperor gave to people as gifts, tokens for a job well done, so it was rumored. This was all in secret. I didn’t have one myself. These little trophies only went to guys like my friend the Emperor, guys who’d been to the good universities on Coruscant, guys who knew one another’s families, and vacationed in the same places. People who grow up to get high paying government jobs working as special agents, maybe even dispatched on the orders of my friend the Emperor himself.  
  
I looked at the detonator, then tossed it to Shizla. She caught it and didn’t even flinch. Her eyes were locked on the pirate. Shizla crossed her arms, displaying her blood soaked knife for him.  
  
“Why did you come after us?” I asked the pirate in an even tone. I hadn’t done anything to the pirates, yet they thought their ploy was believable. I didn’t mind the dishonesty half as much as I minded their opinion of me. They must have thought I was stupid. “I mean, not even a proposal for a mutually beneficial alliance first or something, then masquerade the kidnapping as a retaliation.” I was already had it on my ‘to do list’ to make a move in the pirates’ territory as soon as possible. It wouldn’t be common knowledge right away that these guys were closed for business. “You had to know that was possibly a bad idea. What if those citizens were armed?” The pirate had not been told that it was at least a possibility in a place where clones lived.  
  
I found their recklessness offensive. Several of our crew had families and we had attracted others to live with us as well, to do things like farming instead of fighting. We’d found many children, for instance, left behind in ruined villages after pirates came and killed their families. Imperial plans tended to be devil may care with other people’s lives. The Empire had no shortage of labor since they could force people to work for them. We only had a few thousand. And the pirates were only a few hundred at best. If everyone got killed, the Empire didn’t lose too much, but everyone else would be devastated. They’d given us no choice but to fight back.  
  
“How do we know? It wasn’t our idea.” The agent was trying to get me to turn my wrath back to the pirate captain.  
  
“You know, it’s funny about those weapons, did Grakkus say where he got them? Maybe there’s more.” I was being a little sarcastic. “You know I used to work for the ISB after the war.” Only the pirate seemed surprised. It wasn’t common knowledge, my exact job was classified then. But I was sure the pirate’s friend knew everything about me. He had detailed files of course, probably from my friend the Emperor himself.  
  
I went on, “Yep. The old Imperial Security Bureau. Hell of an organization. They only employ the best.”  
  
“I don’t work for the Empire.” The agent maintained. The pirate was watching him closely, sweating like a gambler risking everything on a single spin of the wheel. Or a guy in a speeder being driven by a tooka.  
  
“Who told you where I was?” My base of operations had been an old Separatist outpost. Like with most of the Imperial forced labor camps, its existence was denied and its location was classified to all but the highest levels of military intelligence. It was well fortified and too remote for the Empire to destroy efficiently. I had counted on that at least, when we took it over. We had always made sure we were small enough and hard enough to extract that it wasn’t worth it. All we’d wanted was a place to ourselves. We didn’t inconvenience them too much, they got rid of their undesirables by taking out rival criminals. So why the change suddenly? It seemed…excessive.  
  
“Who authorized this mission, agent?” I asked.  
  
The gentleman did not answer.  
  
“As I was saying, so when I used to work for the ISB, we would encourage wars between small players to keep them weak. We’d help both sides. Let them commit their atrocities to keep your own citizens praising you for protecting them from the threat of chaos so they wouldn’t see what was going on at home. Let the bad guys take out each other. Report on those horrors to people back in the Core so that people would stay grateful to give up their rights so you could protect them from the monsters. Pretty standard stuff. People have been doing things like this since before space travel.” I shrugged. “What you did was a purposefully convoluted plan. Risky. But you know that. Who told you to do that?”  
  
He didn’t answer.  
  
“See, here’s the thing,” I considered the wrench for a moment and stroked my chin Kenobi style, “I read a lot of history, I’m a bit of a fan, really. Anyone who knows me knows that. I wrote an academic paper for this obscure literary magazine once, on Mandalorian literature. It was on an ancient epic poem about a Mandalorian hero who is well-known in their culture. This being ancient times, people were less civilized than today. For example, they celebrated customs like forced ‘marriage’ of conquered people and wife theft as a form of intimidation.”  
  
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The agent did his best to sound tough. But the upper classes of the Core have this accent that was unmistakable even when they tried to hide it. It came and went with people who had been educated in the Empire but who spoke other, less pretentious dialects at home. This guy, however, was pure Coruscant.  
“So anyway, anyone of the handful of people who actually read that boring thing knows how reprehensible I find the concept. I find it interesting that a group with intel on where we lived would do something so specific as kidnap my wife.”  
  
The agent was scared of me, I could smell his cold sweat from where I was. “Sounds like you already think you know who’s behind it.” His tone was mocking. As if I was crazy.  
  
“Back when I was in the ISB, my brothers and I used to joke about how funny it was that white boys always wore the same clothes, like a uniform. Your gloves are Cestus brand. Gangsters only wear those in rap videos.” I pointed out.  
  
“What?” He had no idea. They were, of course. He made a face as if he didn’t know where one would buy gloves if not there.  
  
“So…I’ll tell you what. You tell me everything you know about what my friend the Emperor wants.” I needed to know why my friend the Emperor set his sights on me. If it was a test, or, if the Star Destroyers were coming. I had to secure a peace, if I could, with a monster.  
  
The agent finally cracked, “Maybe we can take a message back to him for you.” He was trying to save his life.  
  
“Oh, you’ll bring a message alright. That I know what their little stunt is. The Imperial conventions of warfare are the same ones the Republic used. Technically speaking, kidnapping family members was illegal in the Republic. Doesn’t mean people didn’t do it. But if anyone found out, it could be bad for you. Generally people would be horrified that their government was doing shit like that. We clones were conditioned for our first years of life to obey Republic laws like they were religion. I actually happen to agree with many of them. But the way agents of the government conduct themselves, it’s just savage…”  
  
“For shit’s sake, stop monologuing, deig.” Shizla was bored easily.  
  
Blue made a rude noise, which I thought was unfair, since I was kind of making his deigey point from before.  
  
“Honestly?” I frowned at them.  
  
“Leadership academy boy.” Blue said it in a tone that implied the title was code for weakness. Shizla chuckled. Blue still kept his eyes on the wrench, though. He was pretty sure I was going to find a way to use it. I think he was hoping he could hold my shoes while I bashed in some skulls.  
  
“I need to know everything about this mission. So we’re gonna play a little game. It’s something I picked up from Trandoshan acquaintances I made once. It’s called Last. The first one who speaks up with information moves to the position of ‘last’. Then whoever gives intel next gets to be last, and the previous guy becomes ‘second to last’. If your story sounds bogus, you have to make a contribution in the order from first to last.” These rules were bogus, Trandoshans can’t tell humans apart. They just skin and kill their prisoners as hunting trophies.  
  
“What kind of contribution? You have taken everything we have.” The agent was almost pleading. He was sure he was at least going to be traumatized, even if the Imperials sent someone in to extract him, which was unlikely.  
  
“No.”  
  
The pirate saw it right away, he was not getting out of this alive. He accepted this as criminals do and then decided to drag them down with him. “He is an Imperial agent!”  
  
I turned my focus on the pirate, “So who hired you, mate. Did this guy just show up for you, or were you invited somewhere?”  
  
“It was that governor with the skull face and all the liver spots. He hired us and told us to be as ruthless as we could be. He expected people would resist. When the woman offered herself to go willingly, they said she would lead us to you and that we should follow the bigger target. By then, we couldn’t back out.” The pirate was telling the truth. He had nothing left to lose.  
  
My wife told me constantly that not everything was about me. I was going to make sure to tell her about this. If she ever spoke to me again.  
  
“Is that all you know?” I asked.  
  
“Yes. Please let me go.” He hadn’t even asked about his crew.  
  
“I’m sorry mate, you’re no longer useful.” I told him.  
  
He nodded. He understood. It was fair according to the pirate code of the Outer Rim, after all.  
  
“Contribution, then.” I flipped the lid off of the crate with the wrench. In the crate were the dicks of every one of the pirates we’d already killed. The other crate held their right hands. I wanted Tarkin to know, when he received my little present, that I had completely crushed my enemies. He would tell my friend the Emperor about me.  
  
The prisoners screamed when they saw the contents of the crate.  
  
“They gave us intel on you,” the agent cried desperately. “They said you would surrender if we captured your girlfriend.”  
  
“My wife, actually,” I corrected. “We decided to make it legal.” ‘Make it legal’ was another of my friend the Emperor’s stock phrases.  
  
“Moff Tarkin said our objective was to provoke you to action.” So I was being tested, then. Like some semi-sentient primate. Ah, good old Wilhuff. He was a player in the Outer Rim as well. Governor over in Seswenna Sector. I’d seen his picture on the holo-net, the man looked like a sun bleached carcass. Or a guy who has been too close to radiation for too long. Being that close to the Emperor can do that to a guy.  
  
Both guys gave their contributions. In the crate with the hands, right on top of the crate we sent to Tarkin, was a hand with a very particular kind of glove. Back before space travel, Mandalorian kings had done this, counted the enemy dead on the battlefield by requiring these bloody tokens to be brought before the king to be counted. At first they had just counted right hands, but then they wanted to make sure people weren’t turning in womens’ hands, so they had asked for the other parts too. On the battlefield, in them days, I guess women didn’t count as fighters. This was an obscure fact that my friend the Emperor hadn’t known about before I told him. That was back when I was discussing some academic research that no one else had wanted to hear me talk about. We had been discussing historical precedents for an all-male army. Anyway, it was a boring conversation. My friend the Emperor brought out a lot of tired old arguments for why women couldn’t do this or that. I always got the impression that he didn’t like women and I’m pretty sure the feeling was mutual.  
  
\--  
  
My wife was still asleep when I got home. Niki told me she had been checked out and the droid had given her the all clear. I had just crawled in quietly beside Lina and held her close until morning.  
  
She shouted at me from the bed while I was in the shower. I came out of the refresher in my towel to see her sitting up. “Deig!” She rolled her eyes at me and I knew someone had told her.  
  
I put up both palms, “I’m sorry about the disruptor. I just thought it was the safest way and I knew the effects were temporary. I didn’t want to give them time to hurt you.”  
  
She didn’t look like she would kill me, so I sat on the edge of the bed. I brushed the hair out of her eyes.  
  
“I’ll be okay. I guess I was just shaken. I thought they might have poisoned me. I was really scared.” She was still shaking a little. She grabbed the water cup she had on the bedside table and took a sip. She offered me some and I had to laugh at how absurd that seemed, her thinking of me at a time like this.  
  
I took the drink that was offered and returned the cup to her. “I know you were. I was too. I don’t know what I’d be without you, Alor.” I always called her that. It meant ‘ruler’, because she was to me.  
  
“I trust you to protect me.” She nestled herself against my chest.  
  
I kissed the top of her head. “You feeling better?”  
  
“Yes.” She reached over and set her cup down to get comfortable. She began tracing the scars on my chest with her finger.  
  
“It will be easier next time,” I whispered.  
  
“Next time?” she thought I was joking.  
  
I touched her face as gently as I could. My hands were rough. “This is war, my dear one. I want you to have training to defend yourself. No reason not to be prepared if we get invaded, for instance. All our other people should have it too. We’d have no problem setting it up, like we did with fire drills and other things. We can supervise, we brothers practiced mass incapacitation drills in the academy.”  
  
“O…kay.” She looked a little worried. “But make sure everybody knows what to expect and they undergo it voluntarily. And none of the children have to do it, you could teach them to get to a safe place or how to put on protective ear wear or something. We already agreed, no military training of children.”  
  
“Yes, my dear one.” I didn’t take orders from most people, but for her, I made an exception.  
  
Lina wasn’t a combatant, she had been a simple girl, like many, who’d said no to the Empire. She was one of the lucky ones to only be sent to prison. She’d been sent to Rishi and had been the inspiration behind my break with my friend the Emperor. I knew she’d never consent to being my partner unless I stopped serving him and thought for myself.  
  
Evidently, my wife was feeling better. The rush of excitement was still with us. ‘You saved me’ sex is amazing. I meant it too.  
  
\--  
  
We had sent the two shipping crates to Tarkin’s office in Seswenna with a normal package courier droid service. We had to use a droid service because droids can’t smell. We didn’t bother to put the parts on ice, so I’m sure they were putrid by the time they were opened at their destinations. I wished I had a recording of Tarkin’s reaction to that to watch later.  
  
A Star Destroyer appeared above our planet the next day.  
  
I hoped that his worship still wanted competition for his favor. That way, he would rather deal with us than the weaklings he’d sent to take us out. I hoped he didn’t care who won in the Outer Rim, he just wanted us to fight each other. I don’t know if the rumors are true or not that he is a Sith lord, he never showed any Force powers publically. But I can tell you one thing about the Emperor, there was no end to the lengths he would go if he got fixated on someone. There was absolutely no limit to his will to do harm. He could smile to your face as he was electrocuting you to your death. Nothing was ever enough. Your only hope was to be useful.  
  
Instead of lasers, a small Imperial runner appeared on our scanners and it opened a channel. They sent a message to me directly. I went out to meet them, well-armed, but without the helmet so they could see me. We brought superior numbers. The Imperials seemed to really want to talk. I was wearing the poncho again, carrying the wrench, much to my guys’ amusement. Old Bantov was in the holster, but prominently displayed.  
  
We were standing outside the meeting place, on a hill near our fortress. It was a chilly morning, so we were around a pot over a fire. Niki’s foster daughter Sotna, was boiling oil and making little fried dough balls that we were eating for breakfast.  
  
Sotna was a Twi’lek girl that I’d found in a sting my intelligence operation had set up. Some hutuune was auctioning off her virginity on the holo-net. I’d won the bid, then took a few of my brothers to collect her and introduced the guy to Bantov. I’d brought the little girl back to our village to live, she was only nine. She didn’t want to live alone or with men, who scared her, so Niki took her in. She was there with us that day so these Imperial bastards would know their little stunt had risked the lives of children. I didn’t expect that it was going to change the minds of too many of these entitled little pricks, but maybe some, eventually. Anyway, I thought it would make them think twice about just gunning us down if that was their game.  
  
Shizla was furious at me. “Why you even gotta compromise at all, deig?” She didn’t know what kind of hardware the Empire had. They could have wiped us out any time they felt like it and they’d barely feel the loss. If provoked, my friend the Emperor had all the restraint of a hammer.  
  
“The only thing the Empire understands is force. They wanted obedience. But I couldn’t give him that. His second favorite thing is to cause chaos. To find things for people to be afraid of, then tell people he was stronger than anything and could protect them. If he can use their fear of me to make people obey, then so be it. I am useful to him for now.”  
  
“But things can change. The only way you can keep him happy is to know his desires.” Lina asked, passing around plates of the dough balls to my brothers.  
  
“For everyone to be as afraid and violent as possible. Just like he is. If he decides I’m like himself, he’ll be more likely to like me. More well-disposed towards using me. To invite me into his club with governors like Gar Saxon and Tarkin. He wants people in charge who share his hunger for power.”  
  
“So what are you going to say to him?” Lina did not want to get involved with the Imperials. Even she knew the rule about dealing with them, she was born in a dirt farming village in the Outer Rim.  
  
“I think my message was clear,” I said, but did not elaborate on what the message had been.  
  
We stood in uncomfortable silence for a moment. No one on the crew had told Lina told her about our little crate stunt.  
  
The shuttle landed and an Imperial officer descended the landing ramp of his ship. He looked positively green. I was sure he knew about our little delivery. My friend the Emperor had sent this poor guy here to crush his enemies with rhetorical superiority after he had been forced to see dismembered body parts packed up like putrid can rations. That wasn’t what he signed on for.  
  
He talked first, “I’m here in the name of the Empire, we demand that you turn yourself in, Commander.” I wondered for a second if this pasty doofus was trying to collect the bounty on me or look tough in front of his Stormtroopers. He wasn’t pulling it off. He should have tried a poncho.  
  
I drew quickly and shot, just grazing his pinky toe. “Try again.” I told him.  
  
He winced. The Stormtroopers aimed, but my guys all drew their weapons. The Imperial looked terrified. Everyone knows deigs don’t miss, he didn’t like his chances. He looked like he’d never even been to a target practice. Sidebar, ‘target practice’ is a clone euphemism for sex.  
  
My wife gave me a look that said ‘why you gotta be so excessive’. She had no idea.  
  
“I know the Empire hired those men. Tarkin knows it too. Just ask him. See what he says. Your goons threatened civilians. Your agent assisted scum to attack innocent people.” I was about to go on, but I didn’t want to seem too smart in front of this guy. So I quit monologuing, deig.  
  
He didn’t technically acknowledge it was true. “The grateful people of the Empire would like to thank you for the service you provided in taking out these villains. We would like to pay you the bounty for their kill or capture.” I raised Bantov again and he put his hands up in surrender. With official Imperial negotiators, they are given a list of offers to make and in what order. They usually run through them pretty rapidly in the face of a person they’re afraid of. Which is anyone. “Additionally, we offer a thank you gift.” The hole in his boot was smoking.  
  
Some Stormtroopers brought down and opened a few crates of spice, which was currency in the Outer Rim. They had also brought brand new real Blastechs, which were harder to acquire.  
  
“Every month. I want new shipments every month. I’ll keep the trade routes clear for you through the system, but we don’t just want weapons. Bring us supplies, food, medicine. And we can share intelligence.” Both sides would hold things back, I was sure.  
  
I didn’t ask them to wipe out the bounty they’d placed on me. That way, they could pretend to be horrified by me in the Core. I kind of enjoyed the sad people who tried to collect it. Shizla’s uncle Hondo had tried to do that once. For that, I took one of his teeth.  
  
I looked at the wrench again. “And tools, lots and lots of tools.”  
  
The Imperial was keeping a stiff upper lip, but he would no doubt tell Tarkin what an animal I was. These demands were easy to cave to, they didn’t cost the empire much. My friend the Emperor could stop sending the supplies at any time to hurt us. It was technically illegal for my friend the Emperor to fund organized crime organizations like us, because if laws were there, he could still pretend to have principles. But whenever he wanted to, he could make it legal. It was really just a matter of terminology. The Imperial acquiesced, “I am authorized to offer that type of ‘relief assistance’ and ‘coordination of our security efforts’.”  
  
Blue snickered through his nose. ‘Coordinating the security’ back in the war was also clone slang for humping. Shizla gave him a look and whispered, ‘deig’. In this case, ‘deig’ meant ‘embarrassing’.  
  
“We hope that we can count on a mutually beneficial partnership with our new allies in securing the galaxy from alien threats,” the Imperial declared. I knew at any time, if I should displease my friend the Emperor or showed any sign of weakness, I could be identified as an ‘alien threat’ and he would release the proverbial hounds.  
  
I could see his end game, proxy wars in the Outer Rim. A grand game, the Emperor let people compete for his approval. But ultimately, he was only playing with himself.  
  
“Should I tell his Excellency anything?” the Imperial asked.  
  
“Tell him I will crush my enemies.” After I said it, my crew cheered. That is how you look cool in front of your guys.  
  
I caught my wife’s gaze. She was stifling laughter. She’d heard my Emperor impression. I winked. She knew I was completely aware that this show was ridiculous. Her face said she trusted that I knew what I was doing.  
  
The Imperial looked over at the pot of boiling oil. I’m pretty sure he thought his head might end up in it, even after we invited him and his men to have some breakfast with us. Imperials are generally untrusting because they assume everybody is as untrustworthy as them. I think Sotna did spit on their food, though. I know Niki did.  
  
\--  
  
We were sitting around the dinner table at my house a few days later. Laughing, telling stories. My wife was spooning everyone stew from a pot and pushing my tooka out of the way. The animal kept trying to get its face in our dinner. I grabbed Whiskeysnap and snatched her a little bit of meat from the pot. She purred loudly in my arms as I had fed her.  
  
I had explained the situation to Blue, so of course he was going on and on about it. “And that bastard thinks he’s fooling anyone with how easy that was. He’ll just be back to get us again.”  
  
“I think we’ll just have to keep him entertained. The Emperor will always back the most horrifying choice. It’s almost like you have to act excessively to get his approval. He wants that person who will do the most damage, sow the most chaos, it will send people running to him for solutions and he can tell them what to do. It works. As long as he thinks I’m a good boogeyman, it convinces him to leave me here. He convinces them he’s protecting them from me.”  
  
Shizla was tearing off pieces of her bread. “You do the same thing. Say you are protecting us from him.”  
  
Blue scratched under his hat. “Well, then I guess it comes down to who you believe. Give deig the benefit of the doubt.” Here, deig specifically meant me.  
  
Shizla shrugged, “I’ve never met the Emperor, but I do know this deig. And he’s the deig that gets a woman paid.” Here, ‘deig’ meant ‘guy’, and with the word ‘woman’ she meant herself.  
  
I petted my tooka apparently a time too many, so she scratched my hand to all hell. I dropped her and she ran off to go and see if my foster sons were doing anything interesting in the garage. “Well, Shizla, I have met the Emperor.”  
  
“What is ‘his Worship’ like?” Lina handed out bowls.  
  
I took my bowl from her, “You know what they say, if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything?”  
  
Shizla tucked in to her dinner, “Weequay don’t say that.”  
  
Lina spooned some stew and handed it to Sotna. She raised her eyebrows at me to make sure I didn’t say anything too disgusting in front of the little girl.  
  
I settled on something mild, “Alright, then, he’s the most despicable disgusting bastard I’ve ever come in contact with, and if he was lying by the side of the road, I would not stop to piss on him. He’s the worst.”  
  
Niki laughed.  
  
Shizla laughed too, “Worse than a guy who would cut off a bunch of kidnappers’ dicks?”  
  
Sotna’s eyes grew large, “This deig did what now?”  
  
Niki threw a piece of bread at me and it bounced off my head, “Or use an experimental weapon on his wife?” So she’d been the one to rat me out. My brothers would never have done that.  
  
I shook my head and dipped the piece of bread in my soup, “Why do you always give me such a hard time, woman?” In this case, my tone revealed that I used ‘woman’ to mean ‘person causing me vexation’.  
  
Blue was on my side, “Yeah, but you know, if the Empire does way worse stuff than that. And the Emperor never would have done anything himself, might soil his dainty soft hands.”  
  
“Oh, that makes a difference.” Lina said sarcastically. She was doing well with her new training. She had already proved to be a reliable marksman in target practice. Here I mean ‘target practice’ in the traditional, non-euphemistic sense. Although I had subjected her to my bad quips about it. She was a real Agent 80085 and I was always ready.  
In thinking about my friend the Emperor and I couldn’t help but pity him. I never met anyone as lonely as he was. I had also never met anyone as envious. When someone gets personal, it can be a show of strength. But it is also a sign of weakness. If the ruler of the galaxy bothers to train his gaze on you, you must have something valuable.  
I reached across the table and took my wife’s hand.


End file.
